


Survivor

by Hth



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Drug Use, Fix-It, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, POV Eliot Waugh, not season 5 compliant, of course it's a fix-it who do you think you're dealing with?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:28:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27648890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hth/pseuds/Hth
Summary: A little salve, a little spell, a gentle kiss on a skinned knee.  Good as new, like it never happened.  And Quentin was always the kind one, the one you'd go to for comfort, to be petted and soothed and mended after a fall.  Eliot remembers that much.Queliot Week 2020: "Not everything can be mended."
Relationships: Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Comments: 18
Kudos: 118





	Survivor

If I could buy forever at a price, I would buy it twice, twice

But if the Earth ends in fire nd the seas are frozen in time

There'll be just one survivor:

The memory that I was yours and you were mine

“Immortal,” Marina and the Diamonds

Altered states of consciousness are an art form, possibly the human race's oldest and most universal form of art. This is one of Eliot's foundational beliefs, and while party drugs certainly have their place, he tends to consider them – at least in comparison to the transcendent profundity of magic or the epicurean pleasures of a carefully crafted beverage – well, cheating.

Of course, Eliot is also a notorious cheater. So he uses his carefully curated collection of artisinal cocktail ingredients to wash down a lot of party drugs, and his classically trained transcendent power over the cosmic elements to procure more drugs.

He contains multitudes.

He dreams about death a lot – or what he imagines death to be like, at least.

A hall of faceted black surfaces, his own reflection swimming up to meet him around every corner – sometimes himself as an old man with a bulbous nose and hair sticking out of it, Albert Einstein hair and poorly groomed eyebrows – sometimes with half his skin hanging like a diaphanous robe from the frame of his exposed skeleton, his anxious hands tugging his face back into place where it sags away from his skull – sometimes with his arms thrown wide open, like a dancer, like a crucifix, gazing ecstatically upward while dark blood blossoms from his throat to his groin, sliding in rivulets along his body, curling around him like hungry snakes.

And those are his dreams when he manages to go to bed sober.

He wakes to the sound of knocking. He always hears the knocking.

That's also what he imagines death to be like. A steady, hollow sound that repeats itself forever. Just so you never have a quiet moment where you might forget.

There's a term for that, isn't there? _Memento mori_.

Eliot has died dozens of times and forgotten every single one. Well, fuck a _memento mori_ , anyway. No thoughts, head empty, Eliot will live forever and ever and ever, amen.

Glory, glory, hallelujah.

He's not especially useful in Fillory, if he ever really was

(once he was, but it was a long, long time ago, and it wasn't really Fillory at all, was it? It was Neverneverland – never never never)

(peaches and plums, peaches and plums that never were in Neverland)

but he does try to bestir himself now and then to assist Hoberman in his princely-consorty duties, which means showing up sober and attentive to the occasional morning meeting and discussing seating arrangements for visiting diplomats. His memory has always been good

(the things Eliot remembers...)

so he can gently drop the relevant info about whose family has feuded with bandits not unfinanced by whose neighboring family, and which animals have disavowed the carnivorous consumption of their fellow citizens (most of them, except for the hyenas, who observe complex and demanding religious obligations, and the owls, who are just motherfuckers). It's helpful. Eliot helps.

Left to his own devices, Josh can get a tad lost in the minutiae of shellfish taguine ( _don't tell my mother, but I'm only kosher on Earth_ , he explains cheerfully – to _Eliot_ , who has never been in the business of telling things to people's mothers) and chestnut-crusted focaccia and some apparently very exciting Lorian dish that he describes as “like a Cinnabon but more onion-y” – which, _what the fuck?_ – so it's Eliot's job to handle the part where Margo will almost certainly antagonize someone over the cheese course, at the very latest, so it should be some goddamn good cheese, sure, but also they might want to learn everyone's names. Pretend they care and all.

Eliot is a middling-fair diplomat, which means that between him and Fen, they can usually kludge together something like saving the world, or at least refrain from plunging it into endless bloody strife, which sounds like a low bar to clear, but – Margo.

So he has – a job, of sorts. He's not _only_ living on Margo's sufferance, a petty and impoverished gentleman without means or prospects other than his pretty face.

It almost sounds sexy when he says it like that, in a louche sort of way.

He doesn't feel particularly sexy.

Well. That's what the pills are for.

_Life is short_. Eliot tells that to the people he sleeps with. It's poetic – literally, it's – there's poetry. Coy...shepherdesses and such. Eliot never got around to graduating college, but he took some classes. He took a lot of English classes, because he could usually bullshit his way through them, and because he really likes fucking boys who are smarter than he is yet also insecure about it, so – humanities.

Eliot has an abiding fondness for nerdy boys with gratuitiously large vocabularies who think that reading books is a personality trait. He likes how they're usually ashamed of themselves for being so besotted by someone as vapid and superficial as Eliot, just because he has sexy, disheveled curls and long eyelashes and a huge cock.

It's not true, of course – the curls, lashes, and cock, yes, of course, but Eliot is capable enough, mentally speaking. He's had no choice; when you don't have money or friends or family, you had better have an entrepreneurial spirit. Eliot is better than smart: he's resourceful, which is more than he could say for most of the soi-disant young intellectuals Eliot has troubled himself to corrupt – all those timid and prideful little man-children, stuffed full of grandiose words and even grander theories about how to change the world, their soft skin uninterrupted by a single callus, their slouchy wardrobes and product-free hair displaying their superiority to the petty concerns of embodiment.

Oh, Eliot used to love watching them discover the boundaries of their skin. The limits of their useless, tiny, bookbound little universes. How far and how fast they'd fall out of their ivory towers the first time Eliot's tongue curled in their ear to the same slow rhythm that his fingers curled in their ass.

He likes to think he did each and every one of them a big fucking favor. Life is short – too short to go around pretending you're just a brain on a stick, when the bitter truth is (and Eliot thinks people should know the _truth_ about themselves) that you would throw it all away just to get those precious brains fucked out _one more time_ by the vain party boy with the eyelashes who's pulling a low C- in The American Novel Since 1945.

He likes to think that, but he never really checked back later to see if their lives had improved thanks to Eliot's kind intervention. So his belief is not very data-driven.

(There was this one boy....)

_Life is short. Time is an illusion. Life is_

_knock-knock, Eliot. Who's there?_

(There was one boy.... Just the way Eliot liked them, softsoftsoft eyes, soft hair, soft skin – and stubborn – and no idea, no idea at all how to find his own skin until Eliot showed him how to feel his way up to the surface of it.)

Sometimes Eliot thinks of him, in the grey hours of the morning when he's drifting just underneath the cloudcover, wired and exhausted and aching for the high he can feel evaporating from between his fingers.

_knock-knock, Eliot_

_Go away. Go away, nobody's home._

Eliot likes to think he did that boy a big fucking favor, but Eliot _likes_ to think a lot of things that only become true when his own (personally handcrafted artisinal cherry-flavored) knockoff Fillorian cough syrup is oozing down the back of his throat.

Really, what _doesn't_ become true, when Eliot's dosage is just right? All the secret circumstances of the universe are unlocked to the initiate. The doors of perception are cleansed, and Eliot is a sorcerer-king – a demon lover – elevated, anointed – dissolved into the infinite light of pure gnosis – immortal, and he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that _life_

_life is_

_life is..._

_beautiful._

_Knock-knock._

Sometimes, if Margo doesn't need him--

(If Margo can't think up a reason to pretend she needs him, because people should know the _truth_ about themselves, shouldn't they, Eliot?)

\--if he doesn't have a job to pretend to do, Eliot just...stays in his room.

He can stay quite a while. People bring him food, and he already has wine.

Those aren't really the days he drinks, though. Eliot drinks to have a good time; sometimes the alcohol is the reason he has a good time, and sometimes a good time is just the job he needs to do, and alcohol is what knocks down the barriers that keep him from doing it.

When he has nowhere to go and no one to entertain, Eliot – thinks. Cries. Well – fuck, he's only human, isn't he? Yes, okay, he cries.

His fucking _heart is broken_ , because once he had everything he wanted and so much more than he deserved, and now he doesn't and he never will again.

His heart is broken because the man he loved, the only man he's ever loved, died believing that Eliot was – what, what did Quentin imagine Eliot to be? Indifferently fond? Moderately affectionate?

Eliot could've made amends, but there wasn't any time. Life is short.

Or Quentin's was, anyway. Eliot's life feels fucking interminable.

So yeah, some days he just stays the fuck in bed and ugly-cries, longing with everything he has, longing so fiercely he's convinced the force of it will split him open and turn him inside-out, just for one night of clean and sober sleep, where he wakes refreshed and doesn't dream about his own corpse, or about Quentin holding his face and kissing his mouth and murmuring, _El, are you okay? Show me where it hurts, let me help._

It hurts everywhere and nowhere. It hurts in whatever ghost lives in Eliot's machine, in his shade, in his fucking shriveled, threadbare, depleted, useless _soul_. Eliot is young and strong and resourceful and handsome and gifted and rich and broken, broken in half right down to the core of him in ways that can never be mended.

_Show me where it hurts_ , Quentin says in Eliot's dreams. He doesn't remember Quentin ever saying that to him in life. It isn't really something you'd say, except maybe to...a child, frightened into tears by a sudden fall. _Show me where it hurts._

He doesn't remember Quentin saying it to a child, either, not literally. But it feels like something that could've – or should've happened. It feels real.

A little salve, a little spell, a gentle kiss on a skinned knee. Good as new, like it never happened. And Quentin was always the kind one, the one you'd go to for comfort, to be petted and soothed and mended after a fall. Eliot remembers that much.

(neverneverneverland. Peaches and plums, peaches and plums, _I hope you don't mind, I hope you don't mind that I put down in words..._ )

Not everything can be mended, though, can it?

_how wonderful life is_

_now you're in the world...._

_Knock-knock. Who's there?_

Eliot is fucking a guy named Venzel, but he chooses to pretend he doesn't remember the name, for consistency. _I'm Venzel_ , he said when they met, and Eliot gave him his most rakish smile and said, _Okay, but I'm not going to remember that._

Venzel just smiled back at him, settled strong, square hands over Eliot's hips, and said, _You know, I think you will._

Eliot lost that argument, clearly, but he doesn't have to admit that.

(He's Eliot Waugh. He doesn't _have_ to admit anything. Die mad about it.)

( _die sad about it_ )

( _die die die_ )

Anyway, Venzel isn't the only person Eliot has fucked recently, but he's been a bit more – recurring than the others. Eliot's not really sure why; he's not Eliot's usual type, but he is admirably eager. He has thick waves of auburn hair that burst out like a lion's mane when he unties his hair, and freckles across his sun-reddened cheeks, and thick, blunt fingers that wind firmly in Eliot's hair and tug urgently, and chapped lips that he'll put absolutely anywhere. He has a wide, unguarded smile. He seems...happy, both generally as a person and specifically to be invited into Eliot's bed.

The sex is good. Good enough to get the job done, anyway.

There was a time that Eliot might have been at risk of becoming a little bit fond, but that's when he was younger. God, he really was shallow back then, wasn't he? Just kiss him like you could maybe mean it someday, and a part of Eliot's hindbrain would be picking out china patterns in a week.

He always preferred the ones who were ashamed to be with him. Made it easier to remember that everyone involved was taking something.

Easier to handle than being offered something.

Easier to live with than having that offer withdrawn, once they got to know Eliot a little better.

Venzel offers...something, but most of Eliot's hindbrain has been pickled into dull insensitivity by now, so none of the old impulses seem to be firing off quite like they used to. That's good, that's better. Eliot gets all his cravings satisfied this way, and they can all be adults about it. Win-win.

( _knock-knock_ )

( _die die_ )

Seven months after his triumphant return to Fillory, Eliot wakes up in bed with Venzel, his mouth sour and his sinuses plugged, floating on the comedown from a night he can't vividly recall, and for a moment he thinks it's real. “Come in,” he croaks out loud. Venzel's leg twitches, the one that isn't pinned and trapped between Eliot's legs.

_Knock-knock. Who's there?_

Eliot's annoyed, not so much with the noise, but with himself for forgetting. Venzel sleeps on; Eliot already knows he can't hear it. No one but Eliot can hear it.

Carefully, Eliot divests himself of blankets and of boy, lowering himself to the ground from his high-framed bed. He gets his feet underneath him, letting the slight shock of the tiled floor (it's tiled in a pattern that peeks out from between the throw rugs – a mosaic, if you will. Thanks, Eliot hates it, but it's adjacent to the royal suites and he's here to serve) jar him a degree or two closer to fully sober. His robe is convenently draped over the footboard.

The noise doesn't stop, steady and hollow. It's going to be that kind of morning, Eliot gathers. That's fine. It's fine. He's used to it.

It's absolutely amazing what you can get used to when you have no choice.

Step by shaky step, Eliot gets himself into the closet-like chamber that Fillorians quaintly call _the necessary_. It's windowless, but the magic is steady enough now to keep a light on all the time, which Eliot does. The tub is far too short and Eliot far too long to make a harmonious match, so when he moved in he just said fuck it and had it covered up and a cupboard built on top of it to house his many bottles and jars full of the finest product that Fillorian and Earth apothecaries can provide; when he wants a bath, he commandeers Margo's much nicer one, which she has to let him use out of pity. Mostly he's haphazard about cleaning himself; spells take care of the most pressing needs, and he looks passably hot rocking the greasy bohemian look. Like Brad Pitt.

The knocking seems louder in here, like it's physically echoing off the walls of the closed space. Which – can't be true, because it's – all in Eliot's head. That's why only Eliot can hear it, right?

(it's funny because that's the whole thing, isn't it? The sounds that only Eliot can hear. The words that only Eliot ever heard. The memories that no one but him carry now. He's haunted by the nevernever of it all. It's fucking hilarious.)

(you know who'd think it was funny? Who would laugh with Eliot about it, dark and rueful and secretly relieved that it was okay, when it's just the two of them, to indulge in this kind of in-turned gallows humor?)

(there was this one boy....)

It seems louder – like he's trapped with it. Like it's trapped with him. Like Eliot is trapped, like he's trapped, like this castle he lives in and the pleasures he indulges in and the friends around him are – _peaches and plums peaches and plums_ – _knock-knock, Eliot, who's there?_ – like they're not real.

_it's all in his head_

_in his head_

_knock-knock, Eliot..._

Eliot runs water in the sink and leans over to splash it over his face. He supposes he should be grateful that Whitespire has running water at all, but he does wish it would run a little warmer.

He stands up and wipes his eyes. When he opens them, he's looking into his shaving mirror. Quentin is looking back at him.

Eliot blinks. This is – new. He heard Quentin's voice, off and on, floating by from around a corner, from just behind him, for months, but he's never seen--

Quentin lifts his hand. Touches the mirror with his fingers. He frowns – it's _Quentin's frown_ , it's as real as life – and his mouth moves silently.

_Knock-knock._

Eliot shakes his head hard, droplets of water scattering. He steps backwards. He loses his balance, but there's nowhere to go; his fall is broken by his back hitting the door. He stares at the face in the mirror, which looks – frustrated with him, huffily talking and talking like he hasn't realized that Eliot can't hear-- Eliot presses a hand over his own mouth. He won't dignify this by giving it Quentin's name, he won't – say anything, he won't talk back to it, he's still high as shit, he won't, he can't--

Suddenly Quentin's image seems to jerk back, like he's seeing Eliot now, too, really _seeing_ him. Like he's shocked by what he sees. _Eliot?_ his mouth says. That one, Eliot recognizes.

Eliot shakes his head. He can't. He can't. This isn't real, it's in his head.

And then it's gone. It's gone, and Eliot is staring at his own reflection, heaving for breath with his face gone white and his pupils blown wide. That's all. There's nothing and no one in the mirror but his own fucked-up face.

_It's in your head,_ he tells himself as he slides to the floor, hunched over his knees with his knuckles pressed into his mouth, against his teeth. _It's in your head, it's whatever you took last night, this isn't real._

Quentin is dead. That's real.

The sound just keeps going and going and going.

_Knock. Knock. Knock._

It doesn't happen again.

Except when it does.

There's water in Eliot's dreams now. Sometimes he's drowning in it. Sometimes he's fallen off the side of a ship and he's scrabbling at the side, looking for something he can get his hands around, something to help him climb back up. Sometimes he's just wading, step by gooey, sucking step, through a muddy river that fights him every time he tries to lift a foot.

It's always dark. He can always hear the soft lapping of the water and nothing else.

Sometimes when he drinks straight from the bottle, it sounds the same. The soft backwash, the current, the remorseless pull. He drinks more, like it could fill his lungs, like it could be the death of him unless he just keeps swallowing.

He talks to Quentin now, when he catches Quentin's face beyond his mirror. He lifts his hand and holds it against Quentin's, feeling no warmth, no texture. Only glass. “I'm sorry,” he says. “I'm so sorry. I can't stop.”

There are – things one does, Eliot is aware, when one is addicted to booze and painkillers. You're supposed to tell someone (who is alive). You're supposed to go to therapy, or meetings, or rehab (but he won't go, go, go...)

Mostly he manages to keep it out of the public eye, motivated by the fear of a scene that's embarrassing for Margo, that harms her reputation for having her shit under control – because Eliot, who used to have the blood of High Kings in his veins, is now very clearly Margo's shit, dragged along through the pages of Fillorian history by her whim. He wants to be a credit to her, and he usually is.

Even though he's losing his fucking mind, he can more or less keep his pretty smile where it belongs, and his indulgences in the shadows – not invisible, but discreetly out of the spotlight.

When winter comes, he's cold a lot, colder than he ever used to get. The fireplace in his room is small and stingy, the pretty mosaic of his floors providing nothing in the way of insulation. He starts making the servants keep the fire stoked in the library – the smaller library, the one with the yellow chairs. He doesn't like the chairs, they're ugly, but it doesn't matter. It's just a place to be. He pulls an ugly chair up close to the fire, its feet scraping directly on the flagstones, and he curls up with a bottle of cinnamon-infused vodka (it tastes cozy) and a little crushed-up something that dissolves on the back of his tongue and keeps him loose and warm into the small hours of the morning.

He doesn't mind the noises and the strange tracers of motion at the corners of his vision. It's not so different from when he's sober.

He's not really sure whose job it is to pick him up off the floor in the morning, cleaning ash and vomit off his face, walking him back up to his room. Servants. People whose names he doesn't remember. If they fucked him, he'd probably remember their names, but he wouldn't admit it.

Is Eliot the asshole? He feels good during sex – warmer, and out of his mind, god he's so tired of being in his own mind – but he doesn't want to.... meet anyone. Care about anyone. It's costing him so much effort now just to care about Margo and – and his other friends. Isn't he doing enough?

He feels like he's trying so hard. Every minute of every day, he feels like he's trying, and he's just surviving the days, holding on until nightfall, until the world becomes soft and forgiving, welcomes Eliot in with parties and music and kisses and the slide of hot skin and the sweetness of peach ( _es and plums and plums and_ ) brandy warming him from the inside out.

He tries to make himself useful, but he's just living for the nights, when he can let go. When there's nothing to try for.

If life is short, why does every day take so fucking _long_ to get there?

He's almost happy, now, when he sees Quentin's face. Quentin's almost given up trying to make himself heard, so now they just look at each other in the moments they have before it all fades away. Eliot touches the image of Quentin's face, and Quentin smiles sadly.

_I love you_ , Eliot mouths, and Quentin just nods. He looks as exhausted as Eliot feels. He leans close to the back of the glass – or wherever he is – like he's pressing his forhead to the place where Eliot's fingers stroke over the mirror.

Does Eliot remember Quentin leaning his face into Eliot's hand, kissing the base of his thumb, smiling softly into Eliot's skin? He thinks he does, but maybe it's all in his head.

No. No, it – it was real. Eliot may live in a weird, ramshackle haunted castle of his own making _now_ , a blur of meetings and parties and breakdowns – which, _life_ is a blur of those things, right? he's just living life – but once upon a time

_life is short_

_life is_

_beauty, the beauty of all--_

Once his life was beautiful, the days and the nights both, and Eliot really loved someone who was really – proud of him, not ashamed at all. Someone who made him laugh and who cried when he cried, until they were all tangled together wiping each other's tears away and laughing more. Someone who lay beside him in bed and held his hand. Someone who mended broken bowls and skinned knees and Eliot's hollowed-out heart. Someone who was never surprised when Eliot had an opinion on an American Novel Since 1945, who asked for Eliot's opinion on _everything_ , like Eliot was someone with something to offer. Someone who offered Eliot the world in return.

_I hope you don't mind, I hope you don't mind that I put down in words_

_how wonderful life is_

_now you're_

_in_

_the_

There was this one boy--

He was a man, actually, and Eliot was a man when he was in love with him. They made mistakes, they didn't have all the answers, but they solved problems together and they fixed things and they made things grow and they saved the world, sort of, and they loved each other for such a long time. In spite of it all, they made each other men worth loving, and they were both so _loved_ , and all his life Eliot has wanted to be beautiful, made it a habit to chase the people and things that made him feel irresistably beautiful, but he never really was. Maybe you can't be beautiful in isolation, is that possible? Maybe _all life_ is either beautiful or it isn't; maybe Eliot was only ever beautiful when his life was.

Whitespire is luxurious, in its way. Whitespire has its pleasures, and Eliot is working as hard as he can to drown in them. Whitespire has tailors and landscapers and jewelers and chefs and men who do manual labor but have an astonishingly chill relationship with their masculinity, Whitespire offers an endless supply of beautiful things, beautiful experiences.

It's everything Eliot ever thought he could want, and he doesn't want any of it. He wants to see Quentin's face light up because he's stumbled across an old Ray Bradbury novel in the back of a tinker's wagon. He wants to throw his son up in the air and catch him and hear him laugh and laugh. He wants to sit up by the fire at night and fall asleep sober and wake up cranky because his arthritis is acting up but deny anything's bothering him so he can still brush Quentin's hair in the morning sunlight.

He wants it back – the beauty, the real kind. He'd pay anything, try anything, get sober, go on a quest, he'd do anything to have the life in _reality_ that he nevernever had, Neverland with his lost boy.

And all he has is these beautiful hallucinations that feel like featureless glass underneath his hand.

All winter, he gets the vague sense that Margo is keeping things from him. She watches him carefully, speaks to him with the same apparently direct but highly unrevealing flatness that she uses on foreign diplomats, not at all the roughhouse teasing that she normally uses when she speaks to Eliot. She's on her guard.

He's a little hurt. He's still trustworthy; he hasn't spilled a single secret yet, not his own or anyone else's. But whatever. He owes Margo everything, and the least he can do is trust her judgment. He doesn't mention any changes, just smiles when she wants to eat supper with him, kisses her cheek goodnight, pretends this is his life, the life he wants the same way she wants it. The least he can do.

Sometime after thaw, when Eliot has begun to idly draft up some concept sketches for this year's Fuscia Fountain Festival, Margo sweeps into his room, looks around disapprovingly, and says, “Take a goddamn bath and shave, I'm taking you home.”

“Am I being fired?” Eliot says mildly. He's – not, he doesn't think.

“No,” she says, maybe a little less sharply than she means to. “I just don't want to have to explain your general – _this_ to our friends. Look alive, okay, El?”

A tall order, her pleading tone implies, but Eliot thinks it's doable. He is alive. He's never been unaware of _that_ , this past year. “I'll change my socks and everything,” he promises.

He takes a bath and shaves, uses the cologne that smells vaguely like Chinese food to him, like tea and plums ( _and peaches and plums and_ ), but that Margo has complimented in the past. He digs out some Earth-friendly clothes from deep in his wardrobe, an olive button-down and a patterned brown jacket over it, with a turquoise scarf draped around his neck for a pop. His hair has gotten so long that he can't be bothered to do much with it; he'd be at the job all day if he tried, so he just combs a little mousse through it and hopes for the best.

Eliot examines himself in the long mirror in Margo's room. He looks – all right. A little pale, after a winter indoors. A little fuller through the face than he was at his peak, which ages him a bit; he should either lay off of Josh's cupcakes or just decide he's okay with aging, which was a conversation he didn't intend to have with himself for a few more years. Possibly not a credit to Margo, per se, but passable.

All he sees in the mirror is his own reflection. For the best, probably.

“Will I do?” he asks Margo when he arrives, spreading his arms a little to let her look him over.

She doesn't spare much attention to his outfit, though. She gazes up at his face and gives him a lopsided, tender little smile and says, “Well. You look more like yourself, anyway.” Unexpectedly, she thuds up against him, hugging him firmly around the ribs. “If this doesn't work, I don't know what the fuck to do,” she says into the lapels of his jacket. “You gotta-- I need you _back_ , El.”

“I'm here,” he says, touching her hair. “You know I. I'm trying my best.”

God help him, this really _is_ his best.

“Okay,” she says, pulling back with a sniff and a quick patting down of her hair and skirt. “Fuck. I love you, fucking – get it together this time. Let's go.”

“Of course, Your Majesty,” he says.

He holds the door for Margo as they step into the loft, which immediately hits Eliot with a dizzying sense of chaos and disruption, a weird atmosphere somewhere between a graduation party and an ER. Everybody's there, and everybody's talking shop all at once, dimensions and circumstances and mirrors-- mirrors?

Alice is there, with her arm pinned to her body, immobilized by some kind of sleek splint that gives off waves of magic. “Shit,” Margo says, pulling her close by her good elbow and taking hold of her hair, pulling her neck to the side to look at the faint pulse of blue light traveling under the skin of her neck. “What happened here, Girl Genius?”

Before Alice can answer, Julia says loudly, “What happened is, we learned that Alice Quinn, _Girl Genius_ , doesn't know what _get behind me_ means.”

Alice wrinkles her nose. “It's fine,” she says. “It went right back on.” Eliot tries to tell himself she doesn't mean _her fucking arm_.

“But you did it?” Margo says. She makes _it_ , whatever it is, sound pretty serious. Alice nods, and most of her face looks serious too, but the beginnings of a self-satisfied smirk curl at the corner of her mouth. Margo breaks out in one of the most genuinely radiant smiles Eliot's ever seen on her face, and she cups Alice's chin, brushing her thumb down it and purring, “ _Look at you._ ”

“I, I,” Alice stammers, pink-cheeked. Eliot glances back and forth between them, slightly taken aback. He didn't even know Alice and Margo were – particularly close? They seem it, though. “Well, like I said,” Alice manages, her voice a little high. “Once we knew it was possible, it kind of – um. Fell together. And Julia, Julia and Kady did most of the--”

“You did good,” Margo says, and Alice smiles again, this time without the edge of smugness. Eliot is _intrigued_ , and – not at all jealous. Perish the thought.

Julia appears at Eliot's elbow (almost literally at Eliot's elbow – he always remembers her as taller than she is) and puts her hand on his forearm. “Are you ready?”

“I don't know, am I?” he says warily, but Julia just grins wickedly and begins to drag him somewhere that he's pretty sure he's going to have to see to believe.

When she knock-knocks briskly on the bedroom door, Eliot almost jumps out of his skin. _Who's there?_

But Julia doesn't wait to identify herself or get permission, she just knocks and then opens the door, then steers Eliot through it. It closes behind Eliot without a word, and the world swims around him, because he's looking--

And Quentin is looking back at him.

He's sitting in bed with a book flat and face-down beside him. The curtains are closed, and he reaches to turn on the light beside his bed, flooding everything. “Hi,” he says, rough and soft, like he's just woken up, or he hasn't slept in days.

“I--” Eliot falters. _This is in his head._ This can't be real. Everything bends around him, under his feet. He's never been so out of it before, he can't even speak beyond a single, shaky “Q?”

“It's me,” Quentin says. “Real me – I mean, this me? This timeline? You know what I mean.”

“How?” Eliot says, although to be honest, it's the question he's probably least interested in right now. “I mean, how – how are you?”

“Oh, pretty good, actually,” Quentin says earnestly, nodding his head repetitively. He looks a little worn, a little bled dry of color, but his eyes are bright and attentive. “Honestly, I – I was kind of tired at first, but I've been sleeping all day, and it's actually – I feel okay.”

Eliot tries moving. Everything has gone so quiet; he can't hear the knocking or the rushing of water. He can't hear anything. He's floating so far above the world, he's never been so high.

He comes up to the side of Quentin's bed, and when he reaches for Quentin's hand, he offers his willingly. Eliot cups it between both of his own, and it doesn't feel like glass at all, it feels warm and uneven and alive. “Were you real all along?” he says. “I saw – in the mirror--”

“Yeah,” Quentin says. “I still don't understand – Julia has a theory, I couldn't follow it. Sometimes the mirrors – I would see different people. You, sometimes.”

Oh, fuck. “Fuck,” he says, almost a gasp. “Q, you were – you were _there_ , and I didn't--” Didn't do anything. Didn't help. Didn't save him.

Quentin smiles up at him, sad but sincere. “Honestly, don't worry about it,” he says. “It's not like I had a plan, either. I was just – the truth is, it was just kind of. Nice to see your face.”

Eliot sinks down to the mattress, bows his head over all three of their nested hands. “I can't believe you're here,” he says raggedly. “I can't believe this is real.”

“Well, you know,” Quentin says faintly. “That's, uh. Canon-typical.” He lifts his free hand and brushes it very carefully over Eliot's hair. “You grew this out,” he says.

“You cut yours,” Eliot says.

“Did you mean it? What you said-- I know you didn't think it was the real me, so I don't wanna, I don't want to assume – that it's true, or that it's, uh, that it's information I should have access to even if it is true, you shouldn't--”

“I love you,” Eliot says, pressing their hands harder to his forehead. _This is real. Real._ “God, I love you, I've been such a fucked-up mess without you. I honestly don't know how I'm still here.”

“Yeah,” Quentin says quietly, sinking his hand deeper. “You looked a little rough. I was worried about you, El.” Eliot makes a strained noise, some kind of protest, or at least that's how Quentin seems to take it. “I was,” he stresses. “I know what it's like, you know? The times I thought that, that I wouldn't see you again. It was really hard.”

Eliot sits back so he can see Quentin's face, but he's seen that before, so this time he has to reach out and touch, his fingers under the point of Quentin's jaw, his thumb brushing near the corner of Quentin's lips, where the dimples will appear if he smiles. When he smiles. “I clean up pretty good, though,” he says.

Under his thumb, he can feel Quentin's face move as his smile blooms. “Oh, fuck you,” he says fondly. “You know you're a total knockout on your worst days.”

As a matter of fact, Eliot does know that, having lived through roughly 365 of them just recently. “I do all right,” he says. “But you should see me in a crown.”

“I was, uh.” Quentin's eyes flicker over him, a little color coming back into his cheeks, enough to normalize his complexion a bit. “Picturing you in less, actually. As opposed to. More.”

“Well, anything is possible,” Eliot murmurs as he leans in for his kiss.


End file.
